LOSING THE PLOT

It was in the late fifties that Julian Symons came up with the epithet “humdrum” to describe the detective novels of Freeman Wills Crofts. It seems from his review of The Hog’s Back Mystery (The Critic online,

May) that Jeremy Black thinks along the same lines. Why else quote at length some of the book’s most mundane sentences? Yet some of the best writers of the thirties, including Dorothy L. Sayers and J. B. Priestley, regarded Crofts as the bee’s knees of the genre.

Crofts is a born story-teller whose plots are discursive, but remorseless, and slow-burning. Yet the teashop explosion in The Cheyney Mystery, the onboard arrest

in Mystery in the English Channel, and the

Mills bomb denouement of The Starvel

Tragedy are as violent as they are shocking. And totally unforgettable.

Pleasingly The Hog’s Back Mystery is one of the best. As well as some ingenious and devastatingly cruel murders, Crofts also provides contemporary readers with something he probably never intended and was quite unaware of: the essence and spirit of British life in the 1930s. Joe Conway.

Peterborough, Cambs.